A bombshell new study reveals a disturbing trend in academia: the deliberate manipulation of citation metrics through unethical practices like purchasing fake citations. This research, published as a preprint on arXiv, sheds light on the alarming tactics some individuals may be resorting to inflate their academic standing.
The study began with a red flag. In 2023, a newly created Google Scholar profile belonging to a seemingly unknown "expert" in fake news suddenly appeared. Within months, this individual boasted an impressive h-index of 19: a metric used to gauge research productivity and impact. However, upon closer inspection, researchers at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) uncovered a web of deceit.
The NYUAD team, led by computer scientist Yasir Zaki, decided to conduct a social experiment. They created a fictitious author, complete with fabricated research articles written by artificial intelligence. These articles contained self-citations and were uploaded to preprint servers. To their astonishment, Google Scholar automatically populated the fictional author's profile, crediting them with the embedded citations.
This experiment served as a springboard for further investigation. Zaki and his colleagues analyzed the Google Scholar profiles of over 1.6 million researchers, identifying 1,016 who had experienced a suspicious tenfold increase in citations within a single year. Additionally, they flagged 114 researchers who had received an unusually high number of citations (over 18) from a single paper.
These red flags pointed toward potential manipulation. Further examination revealed that many of these citations originated from low-quality publications like unreviewed preprints. In some instances, citations were simply added to the reference list without any genuine reference to the author's work in the main text.
The NYUAD team uncovered a shocking avenue for manipulating citations: purchasing them online. They contacted a vendor offering "citation booster services" and purchased 50 citations for their fictional author. Remarkably, within 40 days, five papers appeared in a single chemistry journal, each containing ten citations to the fabricated researcher's work.
These findings raise critical concerns about the integrity of academic metrics. Researchers like Naoki Masuda, an applied mathematician who studies citation anomalies, acknowledge the study's strong evidence and express concern about the potential widespread adoption of such unethical practices.
The study underscores the urgency for action within the academic community and by platforms like Google Scholar. Experts like Bernhard Sabel, a neuropsychologist who studies fraudulent academic practices, emphasize the growing threat posed by citation manipulation and urge platforms to take proactive steps to rectify this issue.
The authors of the study propose a new metric called the citation concentration index (c2-index) to identify potentially problematic citation patterns. However, others like Masuda caution that individuals with malicious intent can adapt and devise new strategies to circumvent such measures.
